We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often described as the Anthropocene.

Research shows that people increasingly feel the effects of these planetary changes and associated ecological losses in their daily lives, and that these changes present significant direct and indirect threats to mental health and well-being. Climate change, and the associated impacts to land and environment, for example, have recently been linked to a range of negative mental health impacts, including depression, suicidal ideation, post-traumatic stress, as well as feelings of anger, hopelessness, distress, and despair.

Not well represented in the literature, however, is an emotional response we term ‘ecological grief,’ which we have defined in a recent Nature Climate Change article: “The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change.”

We believe ecological grief is a natural, though overlooked, response to ecological loss, and one that is likely to affect more of us into the future.

Understanding ecological grief

Grief takes many forms and differs greatly between individuals and cultures. Although grief is well understood in relation to human losses, ‘to grieve’ is rarely considered something that we do in relation to losses in the natural world.

The eminent American naturalist Aldo Leopold was among the first to describe the emotional toll of ecological loss in his 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac: “One of the penalties of an ecological education,” he wrote, “is to live alone in a world of wounds.”

More recently, many respected ecologists and climate scientists have expressed their feelings of grief and distress in response to climate change and the environmental destruction it entails in places like: “Climate scientists feel weight of the world on their shoulders” and “Is this how you feel?”

Photo: Jean Wimmerlin via Unsplash

Ecological grief is also a significant theme in our own work. In different research projects working with Inuit in Inuit Nunangat in Arctic Canada and farmers in the Western Australian Wheatbelt, both of us have spent a combined total of almost 20 years working with people living in areas experiencing significant climatic changes and environmental shifts.

Despite very different geographical and cultural contexts, our research revealed a surprising degree of commonality between Inuit and family farming communities as they struggled to cope, both emotionally and psychologically, with mounting ecological losses and the prospect of an uncertain future.

Voices of ecological grief

Our research shows that climate-related ecological losses can trigger grief experiences in several ways. Foremost, people grieve for lost landscapes, ecosystems, species, or places that carry personal or collective meaning.

For Inuit communities in the Inuit Land Claim Settlement Area of Nunatsiavut, Labrador, Canada, the land is foundational to mental health. In recent years, melting sea ice prevented travel to significant cultural sites and engagement in traditional cultural activities, such as hunting and fishing. These disruptions to an Inuit sense of place was accompanied by strong emotional reactions, including grief, anger, sadness, frustration and despair.

One male who grew up hunting and trapping on the land in the community of Rigolet, Nunatsiavut explained:

“People are not who they are. They’re not comfortable and can’t do the same things. If something is taken away from you, you don’t have it. If a way of life is taken away because of circumstances you have no control over, you lose control over your life.”

Chronic drought conditions in the Western Australian Wheatbelt elicited similar emotional reactions for some family farmers. As one long-time farmer described:

“There’s probably nothing worse than seeing your farm go in a dust storm. I reckon it’s probably one of the worst feelings […] I find that one of the most depressing things of the lot, seeing the farm blow away in a dust storm. That really gets up my nose, and a long way up too. If its blowing dust I come inside – I just come inside here. I can’t stand to watch it.”

Sweeping away the dust in the central Western Australian Wheatbelt Feb. 2013. Photo: Neville Ellis

In both cases, such experiences resonate strongly with the concept of “solastalgia,” described both as a form of homesickness while still in place, and as a type of grief over the loss of a healthy place or a thriving ecosystem.

People also grieve for lost environmental knowledge and associated identities. In these cases, people mourn the part of self-identity that is lost when the land upon which it is based changes or disappears.

For Australian family farmers, the inability to maintain a healthy landscape in the context of worsening seasonal variability and chronic dryness often elicited feelings of self-blame and shame:

“Farmers just hate seeing their farm lift; it somehow says to them ‘I’m a bad farmer’. And I think all farmers are good farmers. They all try their hardest to be. They all love their land.”

For older Inuit in Nunatsiavut, changes to weather and landscape are invalidating long-standing and multi-generational ecological knowledge, and with it, a coherent sense of culture and self. As one well-respected hunter shared:

“It’s hurting in a way. It’s hurting in a lot of ways. Because I kinda thinks I’m not going to show my grandkids the way we used to do it. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting me big time. And I just keep that to myself.”

Many Inuit and family farmers also worry about their futures, and express grief in anticipation of worsening ecological losses. As one woman explained from Rigolet, Nunatsiavut:

“I think that [the changes] will have an impact maybe on mental health, because it’s a depressing feeling when you’re stuck. I mean for us to go off [on the land] is just a part of life. If you don’t have it, then that part of your life is gone, and I think that’s very depressing.”

Similarly, a farmer in Australia worried about the future shared their thoughts on the possibility of losing their family farm:

“[It] would be like a death. Yeah, there would be a grieving process because the farm embodies everything that the family farm is … And I think if we were to lose it, it would be like losing a person … but it would be sadder than losing a person … I don’t know, it would be hard definitely.”

Ecological grief in a climate-changed future

Ecological grief reminds us that climate change is not just some abstract scientific concept or a distant environmental problem. Rather, it draws our attention to the personally experienced emotional and psychological losses suffered when there are changes or deaths in the natural world. In doing so, ecological grief also illuminates the ways in which more-than-humans are integral to our mental wellness, our communities, our cultures, and for our ability to thrive in a human-dominated world.

From what we have seen in our own research, although this type of grief is already being experienced, it often lacks an appropriate avenue for expression or for healing. Indeed, not only do we lack the rituals and practices to help address feelings of ecological grief, until recently we did not even have the language to give such feelings voice. And it is for these reasons that grief over losses in the natural world can feel, as American ecologist Phyllis Windle put it, ‘irrational, inappropriate, anthropomorphic.’

We argue that recognising ecological grief as a legitimate response to ecological loss is an important first step for humanising climate change and its related impacts, and for expanding our understanding of what it means to be human in the Anthropocene. How to grieve ecological losses well — particularly when they are ambiguous, cumulative and ongoing — is a question currently without answer. However, it is a question that we expect will become more pressing as further impacts from climate change, including loss, are experienced.

Moonrise of Rigolet, Nunavut. Photo: Ashlee Cunsolo

We do not see ecological grief as submitting to despair, and neither does it justify ‘switching off’ from the many environmental problems that confront humanity. Instead, we find great hope in the responses ecological grief is likely to invoke. Just as grief over the loss of a loved person puts into perspective what matters in our lives, collective experiences of ecological grief may coalesce into a strengthened sense of love and commitment to the places, ecosystems and species that inspire, nurture and sustain us. There is much grief work to be done, and much of it will be hard. However, being open to the pain of ecological loss may be what is needed to prevent such losses from occurring in the first place.

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This article was originally published on The Globe and Mail.

It’s that time of year in Vancouver again, when the North Shore mountains drift in and out of sight, our pricey view impeded by the smoke of yet another record-setting wildfire season. Vancouver’s not alone — at its height, the haze stretched from here to Winnipeg — nor is it anywhere near the hardest hit. Vancouverites can still see the sun at noon; in fact, we can stare straight at it. But even here, the air-quality index has surpassed the worst possible ranking of 10-plus, forcing infants and asthmatics indoors for days on end.

Contrast that with the best possible ranking Vancouver routinely earns in The Economist’s Global Liveability Index, which was released this month. This year, true, our city fell to sixth place, and for the first time we weren’t even the best in Canada. That honour fell to Calgary, which came in third, and for a while had more smoke than us, too.

So congratulations, Naheed Nenshi, and welcome to the defining paradox of our time: Things have never been so good for humanity, nor so dire for the planet.

On one side of the ledger, we have everything from women’s empowerment and the spread of literacy to modern dentistry, plumbing and the electric light bulb. My wife happens to deliver babies for a living, a realm that offers a profound illustration of historical improvement. The proportion of women and infants who die in childbirth is orders of magnitude less today than a century ago. For those places this trend hasn’t yet reached, it’s coming; between 2000 and 2015, global maternal mortality dropped another third.

We never realize that we’re catching fewer and smaller fish than our parents, or that there’s nowhere near as many bugs as there once were.

On the other side of the ledger, humanity is busy executing an extermination known as the Sixth Great Extinction. The latest comprehensive study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found human civilization has so far wiped out 83 per cent of the world’s mammals, half the plants on earth, and 15 per cent of the oceans’ fish. Like any genocide, this is both a moral abomination and an existential threat, because the same forces wiping them out will eventually come for us. Put aside the moral part for a moment. Slaughtering the world’s pollinating insects isn’t a great agricultural strategy. An ocean with more plastic than fish won’t be an endless source of protein. Throw in the global depletion of potable freshwater, hypervolatile weather bringing ever more droughts, fires, floods and hurricanes, plus, oh I don’t know, rising sea levels set to displace one or two billion coastal inhabitants before the end of the century, and it all becomes — like nothing else but nuclear war — too much to contemplate.

Has it ever been easier not to? The grocery stores in which I’ve foraged all my life suggest ever more abundance and diversity. That message, and countless others like it, hits me on a far more visceral level than any communiqué from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Today’s music is so excellent, the television so intelligent, the wine so complex, that it’s harder than ever to feel in our guts the one thing that’s truer than ever: Our ecosystems are in mortal danger.

It’s like we’ve turned Noah’s Ark into a humans-only party yacht and sailed it to the edge of Niagara Falls. There’s a million distractions aboard, but only three options as far as the waterfall goes. You can struggle against all odds to turn the ship around, stare numbly into the abyss or turn your back and dance.

My personal adaptation is to ricochet erratically between all three.

A man poses with halibut and salmon in 1925. Photo: Jack R. Wrathall / Library and Archives Canada via Flickr

George Monbiot, the renowned British environmental writer, noted recently that one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses is our inability to perceive incremental change. Biologists refer to this as the phenomenon of shifting baselines. The term is usually invoked to describe how each generation grows accustomed to a diminished ecosystem, meaning we never realize that we’re catching fewer and smaller fish than our parents, or that there’s nowhere near as many bugs as there once were; our conception of biological abundance is constantly being downgraded without anyone noticing. But baselines shift upward, too: I can fly to Paris, treat an infection with penicillin or pluck an ice cube from the freezer without any of these things seeming remarkable. The baselines of material progress no longer take anywhere near a generation to shift up, either. It already requires conscious effort to be amazed at what my phone can do.

Photo: Christopher Rusev via Unsplash

“Remembering,” Mr. Monbiot writes, “is a radical act.” I agree. But I’m not arguing for a return to any golden age, ecological or otherwise. The world is awash in radical nostalgia, a delusion that slips all too easily into violence.

If you ask me, the world needs a different kind of radical.

I know. There’s a caveat in the room.

Were I a coltan miner in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or a Syrian refugee, or an Indigenous survivor of Canada’s residential-school system, I wouldn’t be going on about how fabulous life is. There’s a terrible danger in praising human progress (oh fraught notion!), one that white men such as myself are embarrassingly prone to: We mistake our good luck and the tireless work of others for personal merit, and promptly forget all about the multitudes who aren’t yet in the yacht.

A sub-conundrum, then: Not only are things too good for us to worry about the environment, they’re also too bad.

But there’s a commensurate danger in dismissing the hard-fought gains of progress: They vanish when taken for granted. We’re seeing today how easily everything from racism to measles can creep back into societies from which they’d supposedly been eradicated. The United States has even allowed maternal mortality to start inching back up, from seven deaths per 100,000 in 1990 to more than 25 today. That’s tragic; it’s also still a hell of a lot better than a hundred years ago, when the number was around 600.

Not only are things too good for us to worry about the environment, they’re also too bad.

Are there innumerable searing human crises in the world today? Yes. There always have been, along with the moral obligation to alleviate them. What there hasn’t always been is an international standard of human rights, motorized transport or democracy. There’s never been 7.6 billion humans trying simultaneously to preserve their identity and merge into a prosperous global society. And there has never been the prospect of a global ecological collapse.

So I find myself in the paradoxical position of arguing, in all the wrong places, to all the wrong people, that things have never been better! But we should be worried, very worried!

It’s not like I’m the first to say so. Most famously, Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cities with a similar conundrum. More recently and specifically, the concept of an “environmentalist’s paradox” gained brief currency in 2010, when Bioscience magazine published an article called Untangling the Environmentalist’s Paradox: Why is Human Well-Being Increasing While Ecosystem Services Degrade? The researchers, led by McGill’s Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne, posited four potential answers:

1. Maybe humans aren’t actually better off, but only think we are.
2. Advances in food production outweigh all other considerations.
3. Modern technology has reduced our reliance on ecosystem services.
4. The worst effects of environmental degradation are yet to come.

I’ve covered my (debatable, fine) take on the first. On food production, I’m reminded of the biologist I once interviewed about the cumulative impacts of Alberta’s energy industry on the province’s wildlife. Sure, he said, oil and gas do a lot of damage, but if you want to study an industry that’s really devastated the environment, you should be looking at agriculture. There aren’t a lot of caribou wandering the fields between Edmonton and Calgary. That leads to the third answer, the one I hear most often, which assumes technology will protect us from the slings and arrows of environmental desolation. Who needs caribou when we’ve got factories full of pigs and cows? We can seed the clouds, build the dikes, switch to solar when the oil runs out. It’s happening already.

But whenever I’m told that technology will save us from the consequences of technology, I think of the Northern cod. After the population suffered a partial collapse in the 1970s, cries of overfishing were ignored — and catches started getting bigger again, not smaller. Improved radar and sonar technology enabled fishing fleets to zero in on the cod’s huge remaining schools, scoop them up with total efficiency and point to their rising catch as proof of the population’s overall health. So it went until 1992, when suddenly, or so it seemed, the last school was sucked from the sea. In this way, the industry’s biggest year was also its last.

Which brings us to our final conclusion: The worst is yet to come. We’re seeing glimpses of it now, the first of the worst, in the unprecedented cycles of fire and flood now ravaging the planet; in the Great Barrier Reef, reduced to white skeleton; in the Gulf of Mexico’s New Jersey-sized dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi; in the crashing populations of monarch butterflies and other vanishing species. These things flare up, horrify everyone for a news cycle, then become that most modern phenomenon, the new normal.

J35, also known as Tahlequah, pushes her dead calf. Photo: Ken Balcomb / Center for Whale Research.

That said, Newfoundland’s fishermen didn’t wink out of existence with the cod. Many of them moved to Fort McMurray and found work in the oilsands. So let’s say technology can save us. Let’s say we can despoil the earth and still enjoy our human rights to steady jobs and craft beer and free childhood education, until the sun blows up. That would take care of the existential crisis, all right.

Less so the moral abomination.

Around the time my province was catching fire, a tragedy unfolded in the waters to my west. It began when a killer whale gave birth to a calf that died half an hour later. Overcome by grief, the mother refused to let her baby go and instead carried it with her, raising the body above the surface so it could breathe, over and over again, for 17 days.

Seventeen days. The story made global headlines, which is its sole redeeming aspect. It demonstrates not just how deeply non-humans can grieve, but how deeply humans can empathize with another species’ suffering. I’d like to think we can’t not empathize, if only we’re made aware.

For much of human history, slavery was endemic to every continent. We denied women the vote, if there was one. We beat our children. We deployed casual, violent slurs against ethnic or religious or sexually oriented others, and marginalized them to death. Slowly, fitfully, with all kinds of backsliding and failures of principle and mountains yet to climb, this is changing. Humanity is learning to see itself in the other, to feel that other’s pain.

None of this ends until we’ve wrapped the very lakes and mountains in our embrace.

This expansion of empathy has begun to spread beyond our own species. We don’t beat our dogs, we no longer trap wild orcas to be trained at SeaWorld. But that journey’s just begun. Humans didn’t kill that baby orca directly, but we are very much the reason why the Southern Resident population it was born into is on the brink of extirpation, down to 75 individuals. Hounded by overfishing and whale-watchers and climate change and a degree of acoustic agony no human can fully comprehend, the Southern Residents haven’t had a successful new birth since 2015.

Squamish, British Columbia. Photo: Alex Guillaume via Unsplash

Will we ease their misery? Will we implement the sweeping policy changes required to keep orcas from disappearing forever from these waters? If so, can we then keep growing our moral sphere to include not just charismatic megafauna, but fish, too, and reptiles, and birds, and insects? If you think that’s radical, plants are next. The further you go, the crazier it seems, but none of this ends until we’ve wrapped the very lakes and mountains in our embrace.

Because this is where the paradox unravels, becomes a single linear truth: The same suppression of empathy that’s allowed humans to destroy one another throughout history is what allows us to ravage our biosphere.

The good news is it doesn’t have to be this way. We now acknowledge, in words and intention if not always in deed, that it’s wrong for one human to oppress another. Some countries — New Zealand, Bolivia, Ecuador — have even begun enshrining the rights of nature in their constitutions.

Beneath every great fortune lies a hidden crime. Here in Canada, our Truth and Reconciliation process is excavating one such crime, forcing us settlers to confront the dark origins of our land wealth. It’s a moral awakening, a further expansion of our sphere of empathy — centuries late and excruciatingly slow, but it’s happening.

But those orcas, those caribou, those cod? For now, they’re just a bunch of animals.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

In December 2015, the world agreed to the Paris Accord; to slash greenhouse gas emissions to hold global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C (over what it was before the Industrial Revolution), and, if we miss that target, to as far below 2 degrees as possible.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) is not an environmental agency. It advises governments about demand and supply of energy. Since 2012, IEA has warned that to avoid going over 2 degrees C, two-thirds of all known reserves of fossil fuels must stay in the ground until 2050.

But that was to stay at 2 degrees. We have made a commitment to hold at 1.5 degrees. That half a degree is the difference between low-lying island states surviving, or Arctic ice remaining over the North Pole in summer, or increasing the risk of losing the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet or Greenland ice sheet (either one of which implies an eight-metre sea level rise.)

It is hard to get a fix on our carbon budget. One problem is that dangerous levels of climate change are exacerbated by positive feedback loops — changes that release more greenhouse gases from nature due to warming driven by humans. So forest fires, melting permafrost and loss of ice drive up the warming that itself speeds up the warming.

A group of European and Canadian scientists published their best estimates of our carbon budget in 2016 in Nature Climate Change. Their study set the carbon budget for global emissions from 2015 to forever at no more than 590 billion tons. That’s all we can emit.

In 2016, globally we emitted 49.3 billion tons, so now our global carbon budget is down to 540 billion tons. Do the math. At current emission rates, if we want to avoid disaster, we have approximately eleven years before we blow through the global carbon budget.

These are lines we cannot cross if we want to hold on to a functioning human civilization — not a collection of failed states, desperate environmental refugees and collapsing food systems.

So where is Canada in this? Canada’s climate target  — 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 — is described as our Paris target in national media and by the Trudeau cabinet. The problem is it is not our Paris target. Canada has yet to adopt a target consistent with 1.5 degrees or even 2 degrees. Canada’s target remains the same one set by Harper in May 2015 — seven months before the negotiations in Paris. The Harper target equates to 2030 emissions of 517 million tons (or megatonnes).

Unfortunately, we are currently on track to miss the Harper target by 187 million tons.

“We can plan our way to a transition away from fossil fuels, and still help the Alberta economy.” #abpoli #bcpoli #cdnpoli #oilsands https://t.co/E8TYbbcCFf

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) April 25, 2018

So where is there room for a pipeline? Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has committed to capping oilsands emissions at 100 megatonnes/year. Current emissions are less than the cap — approximately 70 megatonnes/year. So Kinder Morgan’s emissions don’t even fit into a plan to meet Harper’s emissions targets.

As Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Globe and Mail earlier this month: “The truth is that Alberta oilsands have absolutely no place in a climate-safe world. Investing in them is almost surely to be investing in a future bankruptcy.”

What about the constant claim that our economy depends on the oilsands?

Baloney.

Even at the height of oilsands growth when oil sold for more than $100/barrel, oilsands amounted to less than three per cent of national GDP. We can plan our way to a transition away from fossil fuels, and still help the Alberta economy.

Alberta’s greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity are roughly the same as from the oilsands. While Alberta has promised to end coal-fired electricity by 2030, and is building 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, it will also allow some of those coal units to convert to using inefficient fracked natural gas. Instead, we should invest in an enhanced east-west electricity grid and bring in renewables from neighbouring provinces, while Alberta takes advantage of its huge potential in solar and wind.

But that still leaves the oilsands, which can’t be allowed to expand emissions by 30 per cent. Here’s a solution: cap the oilsands at 70 megatonnnes/year and create jobs in Alberta by providing federal assistance to build upgraders and refineries.

Yes, those will inevitably include greenhouse gas emissions, but far fewer than shipping solid bitumen overseas to refining elsewhere. This path means we ensure we are producing bitumen on a declining basis, but upgrading and refining in Alberta and keeping those jobs here.

Canada has been losing refinery jobs for decades. That’s why the major oilsands unions, like Unifor, oppose Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline. In the 1970s, Canada had 40 refineries. Now we have 16 and buy our gas, diesel and propane from refineries in the U.S. at higher prices.

We import approximately 700,000 barrels of foreign crude per day to Eastern Canada. Kinder Morgan’s pipeline expansion will increase exports by 590,000 barrels per day. Why not stop imports, process bitumen in Alberta and sell it across Canada?

The answer comes readily. Big Oil has decreed that Canada provide raw resources for export, not value added.

But what if we took a page from Peter Lougheed’s book? His first rule for resource development was “think like an owner.” Instead of bailing out an American company, let’s put federal support behind building upgraders and refineries in Alberta — in exchange for which Alberta agrees to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands to 35 megatonnes by 2050. We would end up with more jobs and a less volatile economy. There will also be lots of jobs in trying to clean up the tailings ponds and despoiled landscape of the Athabasca. Polluter pays.

That is the kind of bargain that makes sense. With this plan, you could say “the economy and the environment go hand in hand” without having to suspend disbelief.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

By Stan Proboszcz. This piece was first published on Policy Options.

Does Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s (DFOs) science advisory process have integrity when tasked with answering questions on salmon farming? If there is any hope of changing the trajectory of many iconic but endangered wild salmon stocks, there must be a resolution to political and industrial interference that continues to influence fisheries science advice at the federal level.

Since 2001, a scientific debate has been active in British Columbia around parasitic salmon lice from open-net salmon farms and their impacts on wild fish. Two “camps” of scientific opinion have been obvious.

On one side, academics and NGO scientists have published articles in peer-reviewed journals detailing the negative effects parasites from salmon farms can have on migrating wild salmon. On the other, government and industry-supported scientists have published papers that cast doubt on these conclusions, thereby fuelling the debate and encouraging the continued operation of salmon farms on wild fish migration routes.

It is well established that manufacturing a scientific debate on the impacts of smoking and climate change benefits tobacco and petroleum companies. Some believe the salmon-farming debate is not very different.

DFO’s mandate to promote salmon farming

The DFO is the regulator of the salmon-farming industry, but it also promotes the industry and their products.

These dual roles were identified by the 2012 federal Cohen Commission on the decline of B.C. salmon stocks as a potential conflict of interest that may impede DFO’s ability to protect wild fish stocks. Justice Cohen recommended that the federal government remove industry promotion from DFO.

An expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada reached a similar conclusion — that DFO’s conservation of biodiversity may be impeded by its relationship with industry.

More recently, DFO scientist Kristi Miller broke ranks and testified to a parliamentary committee, raising concern the agency’s science may be influenced by the industry. Despite this, and a commitment by the prime minister to implement all of Justice Cohen’s recommendations, no known action has been taken to remove the salmon-farming promotional mandate from DFO.

Meanwhile, the salmon-farming debate continues. Evidence uncovered by the Cohen Commission rekindled the feud around the impacts of the industry. The subject this time: viruses.

DFO’s scientific stance seems to diminish the relevance of a particularly worrisome virus — piscine reovirus (known as PRV) — as a risk to wild salmon. As in the salmon lice debate, DFO appears to favour Scientific Certainty Argumentation Methods (SCAMs).

Environmental sociologist William Freudenburg, who coined the term SCAMs and studied their use in the climate change debate, wrote:

“Given that most scientific findings are inherently probabilistic and ambiguous, if agencies can be prevented from imposing any regulations until they are unambiguously ‘justified, most regulations can be defeated or postponed, often for decades, allowing profitable but potentially risky activities to continue unabated.”

Within the context of SCAMs, we can compare three conclusions from DFO’s 2015 Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat report on PRV with more recent published conclusions from academics, NGO scientists and Kristi Miller’s lab.

• 2015 DFO conclusion 1: “There is no evidence from laboratory studies in British Columbia and Washington State that PRV infection is associated with any disease state, including HSMI [heart and skeletal muscle inflammation]”
  • 2017 Wessel et al.: PRV can cause heart and skeletal muscle inflammation
• 2015 DFO conclusion 2: “HSMI has not been reported on B.C. salmon farms”
  • 2017 Kristy Miller’s lab: HSMI was reported on B.C. salmon farms in 2017
• 2015 DFO conclusion 3: The information suggests “a low likelihood that the presence of this virus in any life stage of farmed Atlantic and Pacific Salmon would have a significant impact on wild Pacific Salmon populations.”
  • 2017 Morton et al.: Salmon farms may spread PRV to wild salmon and impede their ability to migrate upstream and spawn.

Mirroring the salmon lice debate, DFO’s PRV conclusions appear to exploit the uncertainty around the evidence and steer away from exercising precautionary action to protect wild fish.

The 2015 DFO report ends with unsubstantiated platitudes about B.C.’s “robust” disease surveillance program that purportedly minimizes the threat of diseases spreading from farms to wild fish. It appears DFO’s premier peer-review science advisory process, CSAS, produced premature conclusions that coincidently aligned with industry conclusions, but that are now in question.

This raises the question: Is the salmon-farming industry influencing DFO’s Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat?

Independence of federal science advisory body in question

DFO is responsible for three oceans and thousands of lakes, rivers and species, and its decisions need to be informed by sound science.

The Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat, established in the early 2000s, is headquartered in DFO and coordinates science review processes throughout the country with the goal of providing high-quality scientific advice to the minister of fisheries and oceans, managers and other interested parties.

CSAS coordinates over 100 science advisory processes a year and responds to specific questions on various subjects, such as the state of fish stocks, species at risk and other fisheries issues. Federal scientists from DFO and other agencies typically comprise a significant segment of each advisory process; however, external experts are also invited to participate in the peer reviews.

The Cohen inquiry had significant implications. It identified pathogens from salmon farms as a risk to wild fish and made several related recommendations. Two of particular interest state that salmon farms located along a key wild salmon migration bottleneck should be removed unless the minister of fisheries is satisfied they do not pose more than a “minimal risk of serious harm” to wild fish.

The minister is also required to summarize the information relied on and include detailed reasons for the department’s decision.

Cunningly, these recommendations shift the burden of proof and place them firmly on the federal government, if it insists on allowing farms to operate.

When the minister needed “detailed reasons,” a new series of CSAS processes was initiated, examining the risk of various pathogens from salmon farms on wild salmon. The first examined the risk of infectious haematopoietic necrosis virus (IHNV), another salmon virus.

I was asked to sit on the steering committee as a representative of the conservation community. I accepted.

This CSAS meeting was held December 5-8, 2016, in Vancouver. It examined five technical papers.

The first four covered oceanography, salmon-farm disease management practices, Fraser sockeye salmon biology and IHNV. The fifth drew on information from the other four and purported to examine the risk to wild sockeye salmon from IHNV arising from salmon farms. The final Science Advisory report was published days before Christmas 2017, over six months late.

How to improve independence in aquaculture science in Canada

After participating throughout DFO’s CSAS process, I developed some recommendations for its future conduct.

1. Separate CSAS from DFO.

During the process, I witnessed several instances that suggested DFO scientists were hesitant to freely express views that might be unfavourable to industry. During the peer-review meetings, two DFO scientists quietly urged me to raise concern about the use of a confidential memorandum of understanding (MoU) among several salmon-farming companies.

Allegedly, the MoU detailed voluntary industry disease management practices. The shocking thing was that this MoU was being used to substantiate a final conclusion in the CSAS report that there is reasonable certainty that an IHNV outbreak on salmon farms in the Discovery Islands is very unlikely.

Yet an author of the report refused to provide access to review the MoU. The inability to review the details of substantiating information is contradictory to the fundamental principles of transparency and peer-reviewed science.

In another instance, a report author deferred to DFO aquaculture management staff several questions about possible constraints that may arise in their research due to the use of summarized farm data. I think that serious concerns arise when scientists do not feel free to answer questions about their research, whether it aligns with industry or not.

These two problems give rise to questions around political interference impeding good science advice, similar to those raised over the mismanagement and collapse of east coast cod stocks.

CSAS professes to follow the Government of Canada’s Science Advice for Government Effectiveness guidelines, yet seems to violate a stated core principle around transparency and openness.

Having a science advisory process that is at arm’s length from DFO could improve the integrity of the science advice produced on fisheries issues. Good advice is critical at a time when many salmon stocks are in decline.

2. Make potential conflict of interest disclosure explicit and mandatory.

After I experienced the CSAS process, it was apparent to me that some steering committee members, participants, report authors and reviewers had current or recent connections to the salmon-farming industry.

Unlike many scientific journals, CSAS does not have explicit requirements for the disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. As a steering committee member, I requested that it include explicit conflict-of-interest criteria but was assured by the chair and lead organizer (who both held current and recent high-ranking DFO aquaculture management positions) that this was unnecessary. I was also assured that all steering committee members and participants would be listed in the final reports. No such list was published that I can see.

CSAS is supposedly based on DFO’s Values and Ethics Code, which states government will take “all possible steps to recognize, prevent, report, and resolve any real, apparent or potential conflicts of interest between our official responsibilities and any of our private affairs.”

I witnessed no explicit steps during the process.

Aside from direct financial benefits, there are many potential sources of conflicts of interest in science communication. The CSAS process should immediately integrate strong conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements for all participants, authors and steering committee members.

The long-standing scientific debate around salmon farming and around CSAS and DFO’s potential conflicting interests requires immediate resolution.

In February 2018, it was announced that Minister of Science Kirsty Duncan has asked Canada’s chief science adviser, Mona Nemer, to lead an independent expert panel on the appropriate use of scientific evidence in decision-making around protecting the marine environment, as it relates to salmon farming. More recently it was revealed that the “independent” panel will be substantially supported by DFO staff.

Time will tell what Canadians will get from yet another investigation into the salmon-farming industry. Canada’s commitment to science-based decision-making and to iconic wild salmon are at stake.

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Kinder Morgan’s decision to suspend work on its controversial $7.4-billion Trans Mountain pipeline looks like a another corporate attempt to blackmail Canadian governments.

On Sunday the Texas-based company, which emerged from the ashes of scandal-ridden Enron, abruptly announced it was suspending all “non-essential” work on the export pipeline.

Steve Kean, CEO of Kinder Morgan Canada, blamed the B.C. government for the suspension — even though the National Energy Board has not approved construction for any portion of the project but the Westridge marine terminal in Burnaby.

Even Kinder Morgan has repeatedly acknowledged the reality of setbacks in presentations to investors, citing “a potential unmitigated project delay to December 2020” as recently as last month.

Still, Kean blamed B.C. “What we have is a government that is openly in opposition and has reaffirmed that opposition very recently,” he said.

But aren’t democracies supposed to challenge projects that impose unprecedented economic and environment risks on their citizens?

Wouldn’t a tanker spill of diluted bitumen in the Salish Sea, where one-third of western Canada’s population lives, be an economic and environmental catastrophe, devastating tourism, property values and marine life?

Wouldn’t the doubling of tolls on the expanded pipeline, as approved by the National Energy Board, raise gas prices for British Columbian motorists by $100 million a year? The pipeline now supplies southern B.C. with most of its petroleum.

Won’t Alberta, by exporting diluted bitumen to Asian refineries, repeat the original Canadian sin of failing to add value to resources at home, giving up thousands of jobs and billions in revenue?

How can exporting one of the world’s most carbon intensive fuels help fight climate change?

And can’t corporations with viable projects accommodate citizens, courts, First Nations and economists who think such costs and liabilities should be properly accounted for?

But Kinder Morgan prefers bluster and blackmail instead of the reality that the project was never a sound venture because it was about privatizing gains and socializing costs.

Economist Robyn Allan has repeatedly argued that Kinder Morgan is no ordinary company and the Trans Mountain expansion project has been uneconomic since day one.

She told The Tyee that “Kinder Morgan is looking for an exit strategy, but it likely includes a need to demonize Ottawa in order to set the stage for a suit under NAFTA.”

The drama begins with the biased workings of the National Energy Board, which refused to look at downstream and upstream climate impacts of the project and even failed to scrutinize its commercial viability during public hearings.

The best evidence from experts shows that Kinder Morgan, the Canadian government and Notley have misrepresented the pipeline’s illusory benefits.

A pipeline to the coast will not raise bitumen prices, because all global markets discount junk crude due to its poor quality.

The ill-conceived project will export refining jobs and great clouds of climate-changing emissions to China. In addition tanker traffic place southern resident orcas at risk.

The Houston-based firm that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley now salute as a defender of Canada’s national interest is the spawn of Enron, found guilty of accounting fraud and corruption. The energy trader’s collapse cost shareholders $74 billion and killed 20,000 jobs.

Kinder Morgan, a dirty and unsexy mover of gas and oil, began as Enron Liquids Pipeline in 1997. Enron alumni continue to populate the senior ranks of Kinder Morgan.

They include Richard Kinder, a Texas billionaire and Kinder Morgan’s chair. He worked at Enron for 16 years. Jordan Mintz, the chief tax officer, served as the vice-president of Enron’s tax division from 1996-2000.

Kean, the man now baiting Canadian governments, worked as Enron’s senior vice-president of government affairs. And so on.

These Enron alumni probably think Canadian politicians are the ultimate pushovers and dimwits.

During the 2014 NEB Trans Mountain hearings the U.S. parent firm vowed to provide 100 per cent of the debt and equity for the pipeline.

But after a Wall Street analyst suggested the third largest energy company in North America wasn’t spending enough to maintain its pipelines or returning value to investors, the company’s share price fell. Kinder Morgan’s stock value plummeted in 2015 and continues to languish. Lower oil prices and rising debt put its largest capital project on shaky ground.

Allan says investors recognized a year ago that the Trans Mountain project didn’t make commercial sense. As investor interest waned, Allan said, Kinder Morgan couldn’t raise debt or equity in the U.S. markets or find a joint-venture partner.

The job of raising money for the project then fell to Kinder Morgan Canada. But $1.6 billion it raised in 2017 went to pay off debts of its parent company.

Richard Kinder explained the move in a conference call with investors: “So we were able to strengthen KMI’S balance sheet using the IPO proceeds to pay down debt… ”

Kinder Morgan Canada has arranged $5.5 billion in construction facility loans from Canadian banks — but only if Kinder Morgan raises $2 billion in equity for the project.

“And now we learn from Premier Notley and Kinder Morgan Canada CEO Steven Kean that conversations with Alberta for financial support have taken place,” says Allan.

Rachel Notley, Canada’s leading petro politician, apparently can’t wait to pour taxpayers’ money into a project that the market views as high risk and that British Columbians regard as a threat to their best interests.

“Alberta is prepared to do whatever it takes to get this pipeline built — including taking a public position in the pipeline,” Notley said Sunday.

So corporate blackmail works like a charm in Canada.

Allan says Kinder Morgan is looking for a way out.

“The project is not commercially viable and, even before it’s built, Kinder Morgan is looking for a bailout,” she said. “If Kinder Morgan’s long-term contracts for moving 700,000 barrels of bitumen and oil on a controversial pipeline were solid, would Kinder Morgan now be blaming the government of B.C. for its problems?”

In a normal world governments concerned about fiscal prudence and the public interest would let Kinder Morgan abandon a non-viable project. (Some analysts have already said cancelling the project would be a “significant blow,” but not “the end of the world for Kinder Morgan.”)

In a moral world Canadian governments would admit that pipelines and tankers export refinery jobs and greenhouse gas emissions on a disastrous scale.

In a just world Alberta would have to admit it has allowed industry to overproduce bitumen due to low royalties and bad governance. The province has no strategic plan for bitumen other than screaming for pipelines.

But Canada, like its southern neighbour, is having trouble behaving normally, morally or justly these days.

But Trudeau and Notley think it’s OK to embrace a debt-ridden U.S. company so it can export, via tankers, unrefined bitumen to Chinese refineries where the upgraded resource can enrich the authoritarian Communist party.

Canadians should be more than ashamed.

They should be alarmed.

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By Amy Lubik, Ben Parfitt and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip

Just two days before B.C. Energy Minister Michelle Mungall announced a completely inadequate “independent scientific review” of fracking in our province, an international team of scientists issued a stark warning about the human health risks associated with the natural gas industry’s rampant use of this brute force technology.

“Our examination…uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health,” concluded the scientists, who were affiliated either with the Concerned Health Professionals of New York or the Nobel Peace Prize-winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Tellingly, the scientific review just announced by the B.C. government will expressly not investigate the human health impacts of fracking.

Fracking involves pressure-pumping immense quantities of water, sand and chemicals underground with such force that earthquakes are frequently triggered. Northeast B.C. has the dubious distinction of being home to some of the most powerful fracking operations on earth, and much of the resulting damage occurs on Indigenous territories.

The evidence reviewed by the scientists included nearly 1,300 peer-reviewed articles. That fact alone tells you something. The “science” on fracking is already in.

And here’s just a smattering of what it says:

People living near gas drilling and fracking operations are more prone to asthma. Pregnant women living near drilled and fracked gas wells face elevated risks of giving birth to newborns with congenital heart defects. Workers servicing gas well sites are exposed to high levels of silica, diesel exhaust, and volatile organic compounds that raise concerns about higher incidence of occupational lung diseases, including silicosis, asthma, and lung cancer.

For Indigenous people living in fracking zones, the impacts of fossil fuel industry operations only add to the disproportionately poor health statistics they already face.

A preliminary scientific study published this January by health scientists at the University of Montreal, for example, found that pregnant women in northeast B.C. have elevated levels of benzene metabolites (benzene is a carcinogen) in their blood. The 15 pregnant Indigenous women in the study had levels six times higher than the Canadian average.

For these reasons and others, the organizations we represent and 14 others last fall called for a full public inquiry into all aspects of fracking operations in our province. We made that call because of abundant evidence that fracking in northeast B.C. was intensifying and that B.C.’s energy industry regulator, the Oil and Gas Commission, was failing to provide reasonable checks on fossil fuel industry excesses.

In issuing our collective call we said then — and we restate now — that a scientific “review” will not deliver meaningful changes. The people who live in the northeast, who drink the region’s water, who breathe its air, deserve nothing less than a full public inquiry into all aspects of fossil fuel industry operations.

It must also fully addresses the question of free, prior and informed consent, a cornerstone of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Michelle Mungall and all her Cabinet colleagues are tasked by Premier John Horgan to implement.

Now, sadly, we have even more reason to oppose a “scientific review.” Here’s why.

The review will be extremely narrowly focussed. Minister Mungall has tasked three scientists to look at water usage in fracking operations, examine earthquakes triggered by such operations and determine what methane may be vented into the atmosphere during fracking operations themselves. The panel is to make “recommendations” on how to “minimize” environmental risks.

Troublingly, at least one senior member of Mungall’s ministry (an assistant deputy minister) communicated with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) well before the panel was struck. Consequently, the association, which represents the very companies that are fracking in the province, received generous forewarning that the review would not look at the human health impacts associated with fracking or at the fossil fuel industry’s ballooning greenhouse gas emissions.

(A recent study in Alberta found emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, were 15 times greater than what fossil fuel companies operating in the Red Deer area were reporting to the provincial government).

Not only was CAPP forewarned about the limited B.C. fracking review, but it was encouraged well in advance of anyone else to get going on lining up its “expert” witnesses.

The public interest is clearly not being served here. Instead, the interests of an industry with a vested stake in maintaining the status quo are.

In just two years, Encana, one of the major companies drilling and fracking for natural gas in northeast B.C., says it will double its natural gas production and quintuple its gas liquids output, much of which will be destined for Alberta’s tarsands. That translates directly into increased health risks for the region’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents.

British Columbians deserve better. What’s needed are comprehensive changes to public policy. A full public inquiry could provide a needed roadmap. The government’s science panel most certainly will not.

Amy Lubik is a health researcher with the B.C. Chapter of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment. Ben Parfitt is a resource policy analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Grand Chief Stewart Phillip is president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

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Last week gasoline prices soared in southern B.C., with the price at the pump in Vancouver hitting over $1.55 per litre. This was not due to a restriction of supply, although Alberta Premier Rachel Notley jumped on the opportunity to once again misrepresent reality in order to draw erroneous conclusions supporting the need for Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain expansion.

“There are a lot of ways in which the province of B.C. can assure an adequate supply of gasoline in order to combat the ridiculous prices that they pay,” Notley said in Calgary last week.

If B.C. wanted to keep gasoline prices low, she said, it should stop opposing the Kinder Morgan oil pipeline expansion as it would increase “the ability of Alberta to ship more product to the West.”

Notley assumes B.C. needs more crude oil to supply the Parkland refinery in Burnaby and more refined petroleum product to supply the retail outlets that Parkland’s refinery does not. She also assumes that building Trans Mountain’s expansion means Alberta’s oil producers and refiners will ship more product to B.C. Neither assumption is correct.

Let’s review the facts.

High gas prices are not due to a shortage of supply.

Gas prices are not high because of a lack of supply. There is plenty of supply to serve the B.C. market.

High gas prices are the result of a decades old strategy in Alberta to charge what the market will bear, not charge based on the costs of production and delivery (including a reasonable return on investment) as would be the case in a well-functioning market. This unfair or predatory pricing is sometimes referred to as price gouging. This reality exists to varying degrees all across Canada, although it is more prevalent in Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island markets.

Every time the pain at the pumps from this inappropriate pricing practice becomes obvious, it appears industry apologists are standing at the ready to trot out phoney “reasons” for the increase in gas prices.

The facts show B.C. exports more gasoline than it imports. Port of Vancouver statistics reveal that during 2017, exports to the U.S. exceeded imports by almost 70 per cent, giving rise to net gasoline exports of 6,000 barrels a day. There is no supply shortage in B.C. — chronic or otherwise.

Kinder Morgan’s new pipeline will not increase the shipment of product to B.C.

Trans Mountain’s expansion is intended to ship 540,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen — heavy oil — to the Westridge dock for offshore export. None of this crude is destined for B.C.

The Parkland refinery already receives all the light crude oil it can refine from the existing pipeline so there is no shortage there. Further, the refinery is not configured to use heavy oil like diluted bitumen from the oilsands. This is why a heavy oil pipeline through B.C. is of no benefit to B.C.

As far as refined product is concerned, Kinder Morgan’s business case for the Trans Mountain pipeline is explicitly based on no increase in crude oil or refined product supply to B.C.

Kinder Morgan told the National Energy Board (NEB) that “refined product shipments will not increase as a result of [the Trans Mountain Expansion Project].”

Unfair pricing at the pump will not change no matter what happens with the Trans Mountain expansion because it is not due to a scarcity of supply. Addressing the failure of the market to fairly determine gasoline prices requires policy direction from government and meaningful regulation.

If the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is built, B.C.’s gas prices will increase. https://t.co/htqlwYcGeC

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) March 28, 2018

If the Trans Mountain expansion is built, B.C.’s gas prices will increase.

We know regional gas prices will rise if Trans Mountain’s expansion proceeds because the NEB approved an increase in toll rates on the existing pipeline that guarantees it. The board gave Kinder Morgan permission to more than double the cost of delivering a barrel of gasoline or diesel to B.C. motorists on the existing pipeline in order to help pay for the new one.

Higher transportation costs on the existing line will ratchet up pump prices. Producers and refiners consider increased transportation costs a cost of doing business and they get passed onto end-users.

Trans Mountain’s expansion — a heavy oil pipeline Notley maintains is for the benefit of offshore markets in Asia — is not commercially viable unless B.C. consumers and businesses subsidize it through higher gas prices here at home.

Big Oil needs B.C.’s market demand more than B.C. needs Alberta’s refined product.

Notley has threatened B.C. with an ultimatum — stop resisting the expansion or face serious supply restriction. But her threat to “turn off the taps” is idle.

Kinder Morgan and Alberta’s oil producers and refiners will not allow this kind of behaviour. It would send shock waves through the international business community and will fundamentally cost Alberta’s oil sector more than it will cost B.C.

B.C. is an important market for Alberta’s refiners and light oil producers.

If supply from Trans Mountain is shut off, the Parkland refinery can turn to offshore crude while other retail distribution systems can seek imported refined product — likely at lower prices if existing supply agreements are rendered invalid through Alberta legislated restrictions. A marine terminal to deliver jet fuel to the Vancouver International Airport is in the process of being constructed with the expressed purpose of being able to access jet fuel supply at lower cost from numerous markets.

Turning off the taps in B.C. would flood the Prairies and end up costing Alberta’s refinery sector.

Since the Trans Mountain pipeline delivers gas from Edmonton refineries to B.C., if supply were to be curtailed, downward pressure on retail prices in Prairie markets would mount because of a corresponding over-supply there.

That would mean every barrel supplied in Alberta would take some hit — not just the barrels diverted from B.C.

In order to limit supply in one market without a corresponding loss, there needs to be demand in another. The demand is not there.

Which companies are poised to take the hit in Alberta? Suncor, Imperial and Shell.

Suncor is poised for a double whammy. Suncor is the major shipper of refined gasoline and diesel product to B.C. along Trans Mountain for sale in Petro-Canada stations, but also under agreement with other retail outlets.

There is little likelihood Suncor will break contracts and destroy long-term business relationships with others in B.C. undermining not only its short-term, but long-term profitability in order to support Notley’s political posturing.

Kinder Morgan has too much to lose if shipments along its pipeline are curtailed — including the ability to finance its project.

Notley has not connected the dots between Kinder Morgan Canada Limited’s (KML) revenue stream and the company’s ability to proceed with the Trans Mountain expansion, either.

Current toll rates charged on the existing pipeline provide a significant portion of the company’s cash flow. It is not trivial.

Interrupting Kinder Morgan Canada’s revenue stream by limiting supply impedes the company’s ability to pay dividends to its shareholders. This not only hurts Canadian investors, it particularly hurts Kinder Morgan’s ’s Texas-based parent Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI) in Houston.

Kinder Morgan senior still owns 70 per cent of the Canadian company. KMI needs dividends from the Canadian operations to support its ongoing financial challenges. An interruption of Trans Mountain’s existing revenue stream would get in the way of KMI’s cash flow needs .

Interruption of Trans Mountain’s existing revenue stream, by limiting pipeline shipments, would also impede Kinder Morgan Canada’s ability to pay dividends on its $550 million in outstanding preferred shares.

As well, Kinder Morgan Canada still needs to raise more than $2 billion in equity capital to help finance its expansion. Try going to financial markets to raise risk capital while revenues are impaired because of a legislated election ploy.

Finally, if reduced cash flow from “turning off the taps” — even just a little bit — causes a credit rating downgrade for the Canadian operations, Canada’s big banks could pull their $5.5 billion construction loan facility. Without the credit facility keeping the expansion afloat, the Trans Mountain expansion sinks.

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By Melina Laboucan-Massimo, David Suzuki Foundation Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change Fellow. This piece originally appeared on the David Suzuki Foundation website.

On International Women’s Day, I doubt industrial projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline are top of mind for most. But there is a direct link between natural resource extraction and violence against largely Indigenous women and girls, which serves as an important reminder: violence against the land begets violence against women.

Along with pipelines and the extractive economic engines they support — like Alberta’s oilsands — come so-called “man camps.” Located near extraction sites, these are where mostly male workers live in close quarters for weeks or months at a time.

Most are outsiders to the region, lured in by the prospect of making a lot of money in a short time. Many must leave their families and communities to find work in the oilsands, when their preference would be to stay put, due to economic downturns at home. They seldom have ties to neighbouring First Nations communities.

It’s not surprising that some workers turn to drugs, alcohol and sex to blow off steam during days off. Studies show that demand for sex work accompanies intensive resource development due to the high number of male workers with excess income. This creates a dangerous mix for women in nearby communities, as the transience of the mostly male workforce means few are held accountable for what they do in or near camp.

A recent Amnesty International study confirms what I and many other Indigenous Peoples have known for a long time: Indigenous women living near these camps suffer disproportionately high rates of violence.

In 2016, Amnesty’s Out of Sight, Out of Mind report found that resource extraction in northern communities puts women at risk. It spoke to women in B.C.’s Peace River region, like Helen Knott, who has experienced gender-based violence by workers serving Canada’s resource economy.

In the report, Knott alludes to the sense among many workers that their economic power allows them to express sexist and racist beliefs they would otherwise withhold. To justify violence, Knott adds that some workers would assume Indigenous women and girls were “drunk, easy and wanted it anyway.”

The problem plagues Indigenous women and their communities wherever resource extraction takes place. In North Dakota, a 2010-13 oil boom resulted in a dramatic increase in gender-based violence toward Indigenous women living in and around the Fort Berthold Reservation.

Research compiled by Honor the Earth found that the number of reported rapes increased as man camps more than doubled the region’s population, supporting the Bakken oil boom.

Indigenous women and girls already suffer the highest rates of violence in Canada. Development of environmentally destructive projects like pipelines only heightens the risk.

A 2015 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on murdered and missing Indigenous women documented how, “the police have failed to adequately prevent and protect indigenous women and girls from killings, disappearances and extreme forms of violence, and have failed to diligently and promptly investigate these acts.”

Violence against Indigenous women has systemic causes that are colonial in nature, dating back to racist policies that included separating Indigenous children from their parents and forcibly placing them in residential schools.

We need to unpack the patriarchal, racist and colonial mentalities of Canadian society to ultimately address the reasons why Indigenous women’s lives are not valued in Canadian society as much as the lives of non-Indigenous women. This was so clearly exemplified in the recent court case regarding the murder of Tina Fontaine.

As tensions flare in British Columbia, Alberta and across Canada around the future of Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, the largely ignored consequence of further injustice and abuse toward Indigenous women and girls is yet another reason — on a growing list — to shelve the project once and for all.

If we are serious about social equity for all women and girls — especially Indigenous mothers and sisters — then this International Women’s Day, we must recognize that violence against Earth is violence against women. The path toward a cleaner, safer and more just world means reconciliation with all women, girls and Mother Nature alike.

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By Candis Callison, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia and Mary-Lynn Young, Associate professor, Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia

What can the events surrounding Colten Boushie’s death, the trial verdict and its media coverage tell us about the role of journalism and journalists in relation to Indigenous concerns in Canada? All too much.

There is a well-documented history of Canadian newspapers’ complicity with colonialism and state-sponsored violence against Indigenous people from pre-Confederation forward. And despite the last several decades of front-page coverage that includes the uprising in Oka to Idle No More and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, mainstream media are only doing marginally better than they have before.

Why race matters

Instead, Indigenous scholars, activists and community members are largely doing the important work of situating Colten Boushie’s life and death within the colonial context, answering not if race was a factor, but how and why it matters.

For those countering more than a century of journalism in Canada, the work requires looking at news media’s embedded and interwoven relationship with colonialism. In their book, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, Carmen Robertson and Mark Cronlund Anderson argue that Canadian media have — since before Confederation —continually reproduced stereotypes in which Indigenous people are found wanting morally, physically, mentally, historically.

This “othering” helps to “promote a nation,” an “imagined community” of Canada, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, in which Indigenous people are seen as on the margins and the brutality of settler colonialism is seen as natural and normal.

Indigenous journalists and public intellectuals do this work on social media, where trolls attack freelancers and not-for-profit media outlets, and the legal and institutional supports afforded to mainstream media are limited or unavailable.

This work entails articulating over and over the impact of white supremacy, colonialism and the indifference of Canadians about Indigenous peoples, and the enduring injustices and structural inequities they experience.

Some of these issues include: Missing and murdered women, youth suicide, poverty, lack of safe drinking water, inter-generational trauma from residential schools, lack of access to high school education in northern communities — a right of all other youth in this country — and the resilience required in the face of these and many other injustices.

With all of the rhetoric around journalism as a public service, it is a wonder that journalists haven’t produced more reporting and analysis that might work towards transforming the systems that continue to be stacked against Indigenous people, including youth like Colten Boushie.

How the Media Failed Colten Bushie https://t.co/c2S0r2Qias via @candiscallison @marylynnyoung @UBCJournalism @ConversationCA #JusticeForColten #media #indigenous #journalism #cdnpoli pic.twitter.com/z0QUis2r9f

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 16, 2018

Public interest in Indigenous issues

Despite a surge of reporting on Indigenous issues over the past five years as a result of both the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Idle No More movement, as well as the broad public interest in Indigenous issues as newsworthy, mainstream media are often late to coverage or they don’t show up at all.

Recent coverage of the trials related to the killing of Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie illustrate exactly how problematic mainstream media can be when they do show up. That’s in part because Canadian journalists are largely abdicating their role in both understanding and articulating for their audiences “what happened” about an event involving Indigenous concerns in a way that accounts for colonialism and structural disparities.

Common critiques of media inlude: Persistent racialized stereotypes, lack of Indigenous voices and experts, an over-emphasis of conflict between two parties instead of multiple parties and perspectives, a lack of complexity and historical context and ignoring fly-over or rural communities.

Enduring whiteness of Canadian journalism

As researchers and journalism educators examining and teaching the relationship between journalism, gender, technology and colonialism, we continually encounter a lack of resources and an underdevelopment of Canadian journalism and journalism education when it comes to these issues.

Even though many Canadians are finally beginning to recognize the colonization and genocide that undergirds the foundation of this country, it might surprise you to know that there is only one full-time Indigenous journalist at a national Canadian newspaper in 2018: Tanya Talaga at the Toronto Star, the author of Seven Fallen Feathers.

There are more Indigenous journalists in public broadcasting in Canada, which is in part a result of the specific regulatory environment that requires greater attention to issues of equity and inclusion. APTN provides an important platform as part of its mission and mandate.

Journalism education isn’t much better than Canadian media institutions. One of us is among the few Indigenous professors at a school of journalism in Canada. Journalism schools also rely on working journalists such as the CBC’s Duncan McCue to come in as adjunct professors to teach students how to report in Indigenous communities.

In addition, most journalism schools in Canada are often in separate units from their communications school cousins, which may result in journalism students having less access to important critiques of structural power relations and inequities — and how media representations can further those inequities.

This is not a surprise given the many studies that have reported on the persistent whiteness of Canadian journalism:

• A 1998 study by scholars David Pritchard and Florian Sauvageau, referenced in this report, showed that the vast majority (97 per cent) of journalists in Canada were white from a survey across media.
• A 2006 study of diversity at Canadian newspapers by John Miller at Ryerson University found that visible minority journalists accounted for 3.4 per cent of the workforce.
• A 2011 study of journalists and diversity in the major journalism organizations (text and broadcast) in the Toronto GTA by Wendy Cukier, John Miller, Kristen Aspevig and Dale Carl found that 4.8 per cent of media decision-makers were visible minorities.
• The CBC’s 2016 employment equity annual report identified that Indigenous employees accounted for two per cent of permanent staff, while visible minorities were 10.5 per cent.

These gaps are particularly problematic because of both the long history of getting it wrong on Indigenous people and the implications this has for rights, land, shared histories and the many systems that govern everyday modern life. Not only that, Indigenous communities are a vital aspect of Canada’s media audiences, and they are paying attention as the outcry over recent media coverage demonstrates.

Digital media has played a role in enabling talking back through platforms like Twitter and independent Indigenous media. These media counter news agendas, engage with audiences and encourage a transformation of perspective that allow us to see various colonial histories and varied Indigenous perspectives.

However, even as strides have been made to represent Indigenous concerns, journalism must do better.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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This piece originally appeared on Policy Options.

Windows of opportunity for transformative change are rare and can close suddenly.

The saga of Bill C-69 is a case in point.

The Trudeau government swept into power with a broad mandate to fix the environmental assessment (EA) policy train wreck. Public cynicism about how we assessed and approved major resource projects was at an all-time high. In part, this was due to Harper-era reforms aimed at appeasing industry interests at the expense of scientific rigour, public participation and due process. But it was also due to a broad sense that these processes, in place long before the Harper era, were profoundly out of touch with public expectations about how such decisions should be made.

The Paris Agreement on climate change and the Trudeau government’s commitment to implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ratcheted public expectations up even higher. Many speculated that a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform environmental assessment had arrived.

Last summer’s impressive report by the expert panel on environmental assessment processes, charged with advising government on ways to restore public trust in our federal environmental assessment and decision-making processes, reinforced a sense that transformational change remained a real possibility.

A more sombre mood has now descended. Bill C-69, the major overhaul announced on February 8, offers little for those hoping for a bold and creative next-generation assessment regime. While it was engineered to reinforce the theme of change and renewal — by deservedly retiring the National Energy Board and establishing a new, better-resourced federal assessment agency — on closer inspection it becomes abundantly clear that the architects of Bill C-69 have no transformative aspirations.

The weight of evidence in support of this conclusion is overwhelming.

Exhibit 1: Independent science.

Deficiencies and gaps in the scientific evidence marshalled in recent pipeline reviews has fuelled calls from the scientific community and beyond for greater scientific rigour and independence in the assessment process. A key concern, underscored by the EA expert panel, was the extraordinary weight these federal assessments typically place on proponent-controlled science. Yet, on this key issue, Bill C-69 is virtually silent. The Bill scarcely mentions the word “science” and does nothing to ensure that the science put forward by project proponents is subjected to rigorous and independent peer review.

Exhibit 2: The need for a sustainability-based decision test.

The legal test that conventional environmental assessments apply is whether a project under assessment is likely to cause “significant adverse environmental effects.” This test has been roundly criticized by leading EA practitioners as entrenching an assessment model that, at best, operates to make “bad projects a little less bad.” In the run-up to Bill C-69, there was broad support for requiring projects to meet a new legal test. Under this test, a proponent would need to show that its project makes a net contribution to sustainability, a potentially game-changing metric that the EA expert panel endorsed.

Here again Bill C-69 disappoints — and potentially makes things worse. It jettisons, for most projects, the current “significance test.” Future assessments will not need to determine whether a project’s adverse effects are “significant”; instead, they will be required only to “set out” whether the effects of a project are “adverse.” In doing so, assessments must consider a long laundry list of factors, including whether a project “contributes to sustainability.” To secure approval, however, the only legal test a project will need to satisfy is that it is in the “public interest.” The result, perhaps intended, will be to make such assessments more immune than ever from public and judicial accountability.

“On closer inspection it becomes abundantly clear that the architects of Bill C-69 have no transformative aspirations.” https://t.co/l7IliaiE3H

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) February 14, 2018

Exhibit 3: Our international climate commitments.

Our current federal assessment law is entirely silent on this topic. After the Paris Agreement, many argued that this blind spot urgently needed to be remedied by requiring future assessments to ensure that project decisions did not thwart our ability to meet our Paris commitments. The EA expert panel agreed and offered a host of sensible recommendations as to how a new law could be drafted to do exactly this. Alas, on this front too, Bill C-69 disappoints. The lengthy bill barely alludes to the relationship between our climate commitments and project assessments.

Where it does, it simply exhorts assessors and decision-makers to “consider” such commitments but provides no guidance, let alone binding rules, as to how these commitments should be weighed against a raft of other factors.

At the press conference to introduce the new legislation, Catherine McKenna, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, opined that if Bill C-69 had been in force during the assessment of the Kinder Morgan pipeline review, the result would have been the same: her government would still have approved the project.

This remarkable observation is telling. Given the glaring deficiencies in the National Energy Board’s assessment of the Kinder Morgan project, enabled by a broken federal assessment regime that her government came to power by promising to fix, only one conclusion can be drawn from her counterfactual claim: Bill C-69 changes little and will be rightly judged as a lost opportunity.

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Mark Winfield is professor of environmental studies at York University and co-chair of the university’s Sustainable Energy Initiative. This piece originally appeared on Policy Options.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball announced in late November a public inquiry into how the economically disastrous Muskrat Falls hydroelectric project was approved.

In reality, there is little mystery.

The project was strongly supported by the governments of former premiers Danny Williams and Kathy Dunderdale. A very limited economic review was permitted by the province’s Public Utilities Board, and the federal-provincial environmental review panel established in relation to the project was barred from examining its economic viability.

Both the board and the panel, to their credit, questioned the need for the project, but their advice was ignored.

A similar story has been unfolding on Canada’s west coast. The new British Columbia government of Premier John Horgan found itself faced with the question of whether to continue the construction of the controversial Site C hydro dam project. In the end, the B.C. government determined that it had no choice but to proceed, given the costs of cancelling the project.

ICYMI: NDP Government’s Site C Math a Flunk, Say Project Financing Experts

The story behind Site C is very like that around Muskrat Falls.

The project was strongly supported by the government of former premier Christy Clark, and the normal economic review process before the B.C. Utilities Commission was bypassed. The joint federal-provincial environmental assessment process that did occur was deeply constrained, and it remains the subject of long-standing criticism from the affected First Nations and communities.

The stories of these projects in B.C. and in Newfoundland and Labrador stand in contrast to the process that occurred in Manitoba over the same time period.

That province had proposed a massive hydro project of its own: the 1,485-megawatt Conawapa Dam.

However, Manitoba’s approach was fundamentally different from that taken in B.C. and Newfoundland. Rather than short-circuiting the normal assessment and approvals processes for these types of projects, the government of Manitoba undertook a substantial public review of the economic rationale and environmental and social impacts of the project.

This included consideration of the need for the project and the availability of alternative ways of meeting the province’s electricity needs.

Given the opportunity for a proper review, the Manitoba Public Utilities Board determined that there was no economic justification for the project. The dam did not proceed as a result.

Although several smaller related projects did still go ahead, notably the controversial Bipole III transmission project, the outcome of the review saved Manitoba residents from the kinds of catastrophic costs now faced by people in B.C. and in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The story, however, does not stop there.  

If B.C. and Newfoundland and Labrador had followed the type of comprehensive public review undertaken by Manitoba for its hydro megaproject, they might well have avoided the disastrous situations they now find themselves in. https://t.co/gmBrjD2nkl

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) January 24, 2018

In central Canada, the government of Ontario has embarked on an energy megaproject of its own: the reconstruction of 10 nuclear reactors at the Bruce and Darlington nuclear power plants. If everything goes according to plan, the projects are estimated to cost in the range of $26 billion. Many critics suspect, based on the outcomes of the province’s previous nuclear refurbishment projects, that things will not go according to plan.

The costs could be tens of billions of dollars higher than the province’s estimates.

There is even less excuse for the behaviour of the government of Ontario, which seems poised to condemn its residents to decades of massive electricity debt as well.

Surprisingly, particularly in a province where rising hydro rates are the number one political issue, Ontario’s nuclear reconstruction projects have been subject to even less meaningful public review than the Site C and Muskrat Falls projects.

There have been no public hearings at all before the province’s energy regulator on the need for these projects, their likely costs or the availability of alternatives to them. It has been reported, for example, that Hydro-Québec has offered Ontario firm, long-term deals for electricity exports at a fraction of the best-case estimates of the costs of the nuclear refurbishments.

There has been no formal public examination of this option, or of the need for the refurbishments in the context of the province’s current electricity surplus.

The lessons that flow from the experiences of these four provinces seem clear. If B.C. and Newfoundland and Labrador had followed the type of comprehensive public review undertaken by Manitoba for its hydro megaproject, they might well have avoided the disastrous situations they now find themselves in.

There is even less excuse for the behaviour of the government of Ontario, which seems poised to condemn its residents to decades of massive electricity debt as well.

The federal government is not without blame in these events. All these projects were subject to some form of federal approval and environmental assessment.

In each case, the federal government deferred to the wishes of the projects’ provincial sponsors, limiting the scope of federal reviews and avoiding unwelcome questions about need, alternatives and economic viability.

Justin Trudeau’s government was elected two years ago in part because of promises to reform the federal environmental assessment and regulatory review processes that apply to these types of projects.

So far, the Trudeau government has produced a discussion paper, which in large part proposes to leave in place the existing processes, established in their current form through former prime minister Stephen Harper’s 2012 “responsible resource development” initiative.

ICYMI: Is Trudeau Quietly Turning His Back On Fixing Canada’s Environmental Laws?

The situations that are now emerging in British Columbia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ontario make it clear that those approaches are not good enough.

Federal and provincial assessment and review processes need to ensure that there are meaningful, public evaluations of the economic rationality and social and environmental impacts of energy and resource projects before they proceed. It remains to be seen whether Canadian governments will draw the same conclusion.

Canada’s taxpayers and energy ratepayers should hope that they do.

Image: Early Site C construction along the Peace River, 2016. Photo: Garth Lenz | DeSmog Canada

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